All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is a BBC television documentary series by filmmaker Adam Curtis. In the series, Curtis argues that computers have failed to liberate humanity, and instead have "distorted and simplified our view of the world around us." The title is taken from a 1967 poem of the same name by Richard Brautigan. The first episode was originally broadcast at 9 pm on 23 May 2011.
Episodes
Part 1. 'Love and Power' In the first episode, Curtis traces the effects of Ayn Rand's ideas on American financial markets, particularly via the influence of Alan Greenspan, who was a member of a reading group called the Collective, which discussed her work and her philosophy of Objectivism. While Rand's novels were critically savaged, they inspired people working in the technology sector of Silicon Valley, leading to the emergence of the Californian Ideology, a techno-utopian belief that computer networks could measure, control and help to stabilise societies without hierarchical political control. Rand had an affair with Nathaniel Branden, another member of The Collective, with the approval of Branden's wife, Barbara Branden. The affair would eventually end acrimoniously and the Collective disbanded. Rand's circle of friends contracted considerably, though Greenspan remained loyal to her.
Greenspan entered government in the 1970s and became Chairman of the Federal Reserve. In 1992, he visited the newly elected Bill Clinton and persuaded him to curtail U.S. government intervention in the economy, letting the markets manage themselves with the help of computer modelling to predict risks and hedge against them, a paradigm named "the New Economy". However, by 1996, production figures failed to increase, but profits were nevertheless rising. Greenspan worried that unsustainable speculative bubbles were forming, but after political attacks from all sides, Greenspan changed his reasoning and suggested that new efficiencies had emerged that his data wasn't measuring. In parallel with this, American investors began pouring large sums of money into economies in eastern Asia, though the Council of Economic Advisers, led by Joseph Stiglitz, began warning that these economies were much more fragile than they seemed. However, these warnings did not reach the president, having been blocked by Robert Rubin, who feared damage to financial interests.
The 1997 Asian financial crisis began as the property bubble in the Far East began to burst in, first in Thailand, then later in South Korea and Indonesia, causing large financial losses in those countries that greatly affected foreign investors. While Bill Clinton was preoccupied with the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Robert Rubin took control of foreign policy and forced loans onto the affected countries. However, after each country agreed to be bailed out by the IMF, foreign investors immediately withdrew their money, destroying their economies and leaving their taxpayers with enormous debts.
Alan Greenspan would rise to greater prominence after his handling of the economic effects of the September 11 attacks, later cutting interest rates in the wake of the Enron scandal in a bid to stimulate the economy. Unusually, this triggered a consumer boom without creating inflation, creating new certainty that the New Economy truly existed. However, in reality, to avoid a repeat of the earlier economic crises in East Asia, China's Politburo had decided to influence America's economy via similar techniques to those used by America on other Far Eastern countries. By keeping China's exchange rate artificially low, they sold cheap goods to America, using the proceeds to buy American bonds. The money flooding into America reduced the perception of risk in signing loans to lower income clients, permitting lending beyond the point that was actually sustainable. The high level of loan defaulting that followed led ultimately to the 2008 financial crisis, caused by the collapse of a housing bubble similar to that which Far Eastern countries had previously faced.
In 1994, Carmen Hermosillo published a widely influential essay online, "Pandora's Vox: On Community in Cyberspace","Introducing Humdog: Pandora's Vox Redux", Folksonomy.co. and it began to be argued that the use of computer networks had led not to a reduction in hierarchy, but actually a commodification of personality and a complex transfer of power and information to corporations. Curtis ends the piece by pointing out that not only has the idea of market stability failed to bear out in practice, but that the Californian Ideology has also been unable to bring about long-term stability. Curtis contends that the ideology had not freed its proponents from hierarchies, but has instead trapped them in a rigid system of control from which they are unable to escape.
Contributors Barbara Branden, member of Ayn Rand's circle, 1950s John McCaskey, Digital Entrepreneur, Silicon Valley, 1990s Kevin O'Connor, Internet Entrepreneur, Silicon Valley, 1990s Loren Carpenter and Rachel Carpenter Kevin Kelly, Wired Magazine Stewart Brand, Global Business Network Alvin Toffler, Digital Futurologist Peter Schwartz, Global Business Network Kenichi Ohmae, author, The End of the Nation State Nathaniel Branden, Ayn Rand's lover Joan Mitchell Stephen Roach, Chief Economist, Morgan Stanley 1990s Joseph Stiglitz, Head of the Council of Economic Advisers 1995–97 Robert Rubin, US Secretary of the Treasury 1995–99
Part 2. 'The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts'
This episode investigates how ideas such as cybernetics and systems theory were applied to natural ecosystems, creating a mechanical view of the natural world, and how this relates to the false idea that there is a balance of nature. The idea of ecosystems was proposed in 1935 by Arthur Tansley, an English botanist, based on his belief that the whole of the natural world operated as a series of interconnected networks. Taken together with Jay Forrester's work in cybernetic systems, which posited that all networks are regulated by feedback loops, the belief emerged that the natural world is composed of self-regulating ecosystems that tends towards balance and equilibrium. Norbert Wiener laid out the position that humans, machines and ecology are simply nodes in a network in his book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, and this book became the bible of cybernetics. Brothers Howard T. Odum and Eugene Odum, both ecologists, further developed these ideas; Howard collected data from ecological systems and built electronic networks to simulate them, and his brother Eugene then took these ideas and generalised them to the whole of ecology. The idea that the natural world tended towards balance became conventional wisdom among scientists.
In the 1960s, Buckminster Fuller popularised a radically new kind of structure, the geodesic dome, which emulated ecosystems in being made of highly connected, relatively weak parts, which built a stronger structure. It was applied to the radomes covering early warning systems in the Arctic. His other system-based ideas inspired the counterculture movement. Communes of people who saw themselves as nodes in a network, without hierarchy, and applied feedback to try to control and stabilise their societies, used his geodesic domes as habitats. Around this time, Stewart Brand filmed a demonstration of a networked computer system with a graphics display, mouse and keyboard that he believed would save the world by empowering people, in a similar way to the communes, to be free as individuals. In 1967, Richard Brautigan published the poetry work All Watched Over by machines of Loving Grace, which promoted the idea of a cybernetic ecological utopia consisting of a fusion of computers and organisms living in perfect harmony and stability.
By the 1970s, new challenges emerged that could not be solved by normal hierarchical systems, such as overpopulation, limited natural resources and pollution. Jay Forrester applied systems theory to the problem and drew a cybernetic system diagram for the world. This was turned into a computer model which predicted population collapse. This became the basis of the model that was used by the Club of Rome, and the findings from this were published in The Limits to Growth. Forrester then argued for zero growth in order to maintain a steady equilibrium within the capacity of the Earth. However, this was opposed by many people within the environmental movement, since the model did not allow for people to change their values to stabilise the world, and they argued that the model tried to maintain and enforce the current political hierarchy. Critics compared Forrester's ideas to a dispute between Arthur Tansley and Field Marshal Jan Smuts. Smuts had invented a philosophy called holism, where everyone had a 'rightful place', which was to be managed by the white race, which Tansley called an "abuse of vegetational concepts." The 70s protestors claimed that the same conceptual abuse of the supposed natural order was occurring, that it was really being used for political control.
The belief in the stability of natural systems began to break down when a study was made of the predator-prey relationship of wolves and elks. It was found that populations of predators and prey had varied wildly over centuries. Other studies then found huge variations, and a significant lack of homeostasis in natural systems. George Van Dyne then tried to build a computer model to try to simulate a complete ecosystem based on extensive real-world data, to show how the stability of natural systems actually worked. To his surprise, the computer model did not stabilise like the Odums' electrical model had. The reason for this lack of stabilisation was that he had used extensive data which more accurately reflected reality, whereas the Odums and other ecologists had "ruthlessly simplified nature." The scientific idea had thus been shown to fail, but the popular idea remained in currency, and even grew as it apparently offered the possibility of a new egalitarian world order.
In 2003, a wave of spontaneous revolutions swept through Asia and Europe. Coordinated only via the internet, nobody seemed to be in overall charge, and no overall aims except self-determination and freedom were apparent. This seemed to justify the beliefs of the computer utopians. However, the freedom from these revolutions lasted for only a short time, with most of the countries falling back into political corruption almost immediately. Curtis compares them with the hippy communes, all of which broke up within a few years, as aggressive members of the group began to bully the weaker ones, who were unable to band together in their own defence because formal power structures were prohibited by the commune's rules, and even intervention against bullying by benevolent individuals was discouraged.
Curtis closes the episode by stating that it has become apparent that while the self-organising network is good at organising change, they fail to provide direction for determining what comes afterwards; networks leave people helpless in the face of those who already wield political power.
Contributors Peder Anker, historian of ecology Jay Forrester, systems theorist Fred Turner, historian of media and technology Peter J. Taylor, historian of science Dr Daniel Botkin, ecologist Randall Gibson, former member of 'Synergia' commune Molly Hollenbach, former member of 'The Family' commune Stewart Brand Alexander King, co-founder of the Club of Rome (archive) Tord Björk, environmental activist Dr Steward Pickett, ecologist Dr Dave Swift and Dr Sam Bledsoe, Grasslands Project Al Gore, former US Vice President Dr Laura J. Cameron, historical geographer
Part 3. 'The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey'